Speaker: Mimi Thi Nguyen, Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Monday, February 17, 2025
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (8:00 pm/16 Feb/Chicago)
Venue: On Zoom
The historical present is often perceived through the presence or absence of beauty, such that distinct personal, social, and political projects unfold through disputes about the beauty we deserve – which is to say, the life worth living. How might affective and aesthetic responses to scarcity, precarity, and uncertainty, drawn from the crises of war and colonial and capital dispossession, help us to understand the promise of beauty as a world-building engagement? This talk considers how the promise of beauty is so usable across a spectrum of political claims, whether imperial or insurgent, and how these claims delineate what forms of life are valuable, and for whom.
Mimi Thi Nguyen is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She is the author The Gift of Freedom and The Promise of Beauty. With Patty Ahn, Michelle Cho, Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez, Rani Neutill, and Yutian Wong, she is a coeditor for Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader. She has also published in Signs, Camera Obscura, The Funambulist, Women & Performance, positions, Radical History Review, and ArtForum. Her papers have been solicited for the Feminist Theory Archive at Brown University.
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://csgchku.wordpress.com/
Follow us on:
– Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/csgc.hku
– Instagram: @csgc.hku
– Twitter: @csgchku
